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2019 Buyer's Guide to Accounting and Financial So ware 11 6. Support agreement. A good support agreement will specify what level of support is free with subscription and will offer several levels of additional support. If it is important to you to have access to U.S. based experts, find out where your vendor's support team is located. It's also a good idea to inquire about the people on your support team. Will there be accounting experts and seasoned representatives available to you if needed? 7. Service level agreements. Given the stakes, a world-class service level agreement (SLA) is a non-negotiable requirement when dealing with a cloud-computing vendor. With cloud computing, you rely more heavily on your vendor for support. You can't simply walk down the hall to ask your IT department for assistance if you encounter a system problem. Make sure your vendor has the appropriate infrastructure to offer the best expertise and responsiveness, and be sure to get an ironclad, comprehensive SLA. As the basis of your relationship, this document can be enforced for many years and is essential to se ing expectations and insulating your organization from risks. Look for SLA transparency from vendors who are unafraid to publish 12-month histories and current system status on their public websites. lf a vendor does not have a public system-status website, it should be a major red flag that they may not have a complete handle on their operations. 7 SLA Must-Haves Your vendor's Service Level Agreement should specify incentives and penalties for these performance metrics—and more. Make sure you've got the following areas covered, in writing. 1. System availability. Look for a vendor that can commit to 99% availability or higher� 2. Disaster recovery. If there's a data center disaster, make sure that you'll be back up in 24 hours, and that you'll lose no more than 2 hours of data� 3. Data integrity and ownership. If you decide to leave your cloud vendor in the future, you should be able to get your data out of the vendor's system—period� 4. Support response. As a general rule, your vendor should be transparent about what constitutes a high-priority, medium priority, and lower priority issue—and should be able to respond to high priority requests within one to two hours. 5. Escalation procedures. If you have a support case that you feel needs to be escalated, you be provided with a clear escalation path and the contact information of at least three people to contact. 6. Maintenance communication. Your vendor should let you know when regular recurring maintenance activities take place, and should post a special notification if any maintenance activity is expected to take longer than normal� 7. Product communication. Your vendor should commit to providing regular updates on new product features and product release notes�